Just thinking out loud but does gay/straight mean anything when it comes to romancing aliens?

Female turians look pretty feminine to me, even in the face. They are pretty distinct from the males. And as mentioned, they still have boobs. If you are turned off by human boobs, then you will probably also be turned off by turian boobs.

I think some of it's the voice. Most gay men I know aren't going to be attracted to a character voiced by a woman even if the character looks visually ambiguous in gender.

Haha, maybe you can tell with turians, but how about hanar? Vorcha?

This is why I stay away from the whole 'What am I and what are you' debate.

It never actually stops anywhere. Eventually you end up in a weird place where you have to reduce everything to an acceptable non offensive name tag, after you've justified sexual preferences discussed
of course.


Its sex, human. Call it sex and have sex.

..I mean, I imagine if Mass Effect aliens were real, that'd be a bigger hurdle then gender. But hell if I know, because while our ancestors probably played footsie with other hominids (which is still closer than aliens for obvious reasons -- I mean, on a technical level, even making time with a sea cucumber is still less dramatic than making time with a quarian since the sea cucumber is more humanlike), our modern experience doesn't really have an analogue for a sentient species that isn't our personal species... Let alone how we'd make out with them, if at all. Add to that that their voices are probably all filtered through our universal translator or something, and hell if I know.

Since this is the fiction-y world of science fiction, most aliens seem to fall neatly into our general bauplan and gender divisions, which makes it easy for them who love ladies to love asari and so on. I guess I'd go with "Maybe, if we ever got some really strange aliens, who were for some reason a romance." But when they fall neatly into earth genders with human voices (again, for the obvious reasons of fiction), it's not surprising people tend to stick with their preferences.

...Except with turians, because Garrus has dat voice and Vetra is super tall and that's fantastic.

Well every alien species except the Asari and the Hanar use the same sex/gender classification as humans, so yeah, it does mean something.

You could argue that aliens IRL would likely have a completely different conception of sex and gender compared to humans, but BioWare wrote them to be "human" enough to be attractive to a decent chunk of people, and that means having recognisable sexual characteristics.

..which could still vary wildly from species to species. Just because a race has male/female sexes and sexual dimorphism does not mean the divide has to occur the same way. Didn't the ME2 Garrus romance have some comments about that?

Frankly even though Mass Effect has moved firmly into 100% Rubber Forehead Aliens and dropped all pretense to anything else, I still think it was a mistake moving to full on sexual encounters with aliens outside the token space babe race.

But since the cat's out of the bag, OP's post got me thinking. What if we had a androgynous hermaphroditic race whose voice was also indeterminate in terms of male or female? If it didn't weird people out, I think that'd be the ultimate in "fair banging for all".

Since the aliens are so humanoid it does.

On the other hand if most aliens looked more like Geth and Hanar? Not so much.

Well that was something else...

I just had this image of a female turian undressing and revealing their boobs are actually mini dicks. Ultimate Bio troll.

I have played DAI. I guess my point was that we don't really know what kind of "parts" these aliens have. Just because someone is straight or gay doesn't automatically mean they'll go for the same when it comes to salarians or krogan